MASS EFFECT 3: A better end
by John Grissham
Summary: A re imagined mass effect 3 ending, with both element of the dark matter theory and the original ending interlaced. Tried to get rid of some of the more nonsensical parts of the plot. About 4 different endings, 5 if you're technical, with one having Shepard live on.


**Short Authors note at the end, look out! XD Also, I replaced the boy the star child emulates with the girl in the live action trailer for ME3. Except that, whole game is unchanged. Since this is my first fanfic, please review if you want to! :)**

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"Wake up!" A cheerful, childish voice said. "Wake up! Please!"

Shepard tried to open his eyes. He was conscious of the fact that all the pain seemed to have left his body. He felt… _light._

A blindingly white glare met his eyes when he finally managed to open them. He was… where was he? He didn't recognize this place, and it was in stark contrast to the hell he'd just fought through. It was pure white, clean, brilliantly bright. Was he dead? Was this purgatory? Or was the child an angel, come to judge his deeds and decide if he could go to the halls were the sinless slept?

He looked at the child, thinking she looked slightly familiar.

Shepard jumped back in shock. "You're… you're that kid! You're… dead. I saw you…what?!" Perhaps the child that had dogged his dreams for so long had come to exact punishment for his failure. For Earth, for all those he let die.

"Where's Anderson?" Shepard asked, suddenly feeling very weary again.

The little girls expression turned somber. She looked away, eyes closed. "No one lives. Not here. Not in this part. Not in my _home,_ " She looked at him again, her face carrying a strange look of wonder. "You're alone."

The girl stood up, facing her back to him. She looked into the distance, though he wasn't sure what she was looking at. All he could see was a glaring white wall of nothing. She continued to speak, "No one has ever made it this far. You are _alone,"_ she sounded impressed.

Shepard tried to get up, "Where am I?" He asked. Shepard noticed that that his left arm wouldn't move, clearly broken inside. Both his legs seemed to struggle to support him too. If he still could feel pain, he'd be feeling it very strongly.

"This is my _home_. This is where I live," She looked at him again. " _No one_ has ever been here before," she stressed again.

Shepard shifted his legs so they could have a better hold over his body, "But who are _you?_ " He fixed her with a hard stare.

"I am the _citadel,"_ she said simply.

"What?"

She fixed him with a strange look, "I am the citadel," she repeated.

Shepard looked back her.

A resigned expression seemed to carry over her face. She looked towards the featureless white wall again.

"I am the _citadel_ ," she started. "You are an organic, an intelligence. You are alone. A single being. I am the collective consciousness of the reapers. You cannot comprehend me."

Shepard continued to give her a steady stare, disregarding the implications of her statement. "You sound like the Geth."

"Hardly," she scoffed. "The Geth are to me what you are to an animal. I encompass the collective consciousness of untold civilizations, organic and synthetic. I am not constrained by the chains of mere AI. I am beyond them, and I am beyond _you."_ The delicate features of her face, so much like a human child, carried a haughty expression beyond any child.

This was a God. The Reaper's God.

Shepard stood his ground, "And yet here you stand, talking to a mere man."

Her features softened, "You have come far, Human. You are the only organic to ever stand here. That alone is a testament to your will, and the will of those who stand behind you."

Shepard felt a pang in his heart. Anderson. Legion. Mordin. Thane. So many more. So many have given their lives, so he could stand here.

The girl, the _god_ , she seemed to read his thoughts. "They are not the only ones," she said, "Your progress is the amalgamation of countless cycles, desperately trying to resist us. The crucible is proof of that."

And as if on cue, the featureless white wall she was staring at shifted. Without a single sound, the wall gave way to a massive window. It stretched around him, and Shepard stared on in amazement, mesmerized by the sight in front of him. There stood the crucible, in all its glory, the device that was supposed to be the salvation of the armies fighting just beyond it. The spectacle was beautiful, even if it was a terrible battle being fought. Thousands of ships of every race and creed, pounding on the innumerable fleet of the Reapers, holding their own against the ancient creatures. But even Shepard knew it was a losing battle. For every Reaper destroyed, dozens of their own ships went with it. And the Reapers numbers never seemed to diminish. The allied fleets could not hold on forever.

He looked at her, to see she had been staring at him. "Why are you showing me this?" he asked.

"Your cycle has exceeded all of our expectations. _You_ have exceeded all of our expectations. We did not think you would ever make it this far," she replied.

She fixed him with her strange glare again, almost as if she was appraising him. "You are an anomaly, a creation of probability, one that should not have been. No creature, synthetic or organic, has ever accomplished what you have," she paused for a moment, just looking at him, "Now you must fulfill your destiny, and become the salvation of your galaxy."

He scoffed, "From you?"

"From destruction," was her simple reply, the childish mirth returning to her voice.

Shepard was starting to get annoyed by the child's cryptic answers. "Why do you do this?" He wondered for a moment if his question should be clearer, but the child once again seemed to read his thoughts before he had made them.

"Organics consume. They destroy. But they also build. At your early steps, you destroy less than you build. Your acts in reverence to your own grandeur, in regards to the greater universe, go unnoticed. In essence, you fight entropy. You fight the end." She looked away again, a steel carrying into her voice, "But as you grow, you become arrogant. You explore, you fight, you climb the lonely lanes of space to the detriment of the stars, those who gave you life. You build synthetic servants, and they often rebel, spreading destruction across the skies of innocent planets. They reach further than you, and you fight to expel them. And as each of you travel among the stars with your growing empires, you quicken the doom for all. Entropy gains new champions among the living, both synthetic and organic."

She paused for a moment, before continuing, "We strive to stop that. We cleanse the galaxy of those who would bring about its premature end, and in the process we make way for the younger children to rise. To flourish. To establish their own line and lineage, their own culture, away from the arrogance of their elders, who would seek to enslave them. Or _Guide_. Whatever word you use, the end result is the same. The elders always wish to put their mark on the younger, to the detriment of the latter. For always there is the will among the living to establish their own superiority. Organics are often more at fault for this than your synthetic children. For there will always be those who wish for power over their weaker, to the detriment of the subject of such conquests. We wipe you out before you become too powerful even for us."

She paused again, seemingly to let her words sink in. Shepard remained silent.

"But most of all we wish to stop entropy from claiming the galaxy before its time. We have existed for a long time, Human. We know of things, of the ramifications that carry into the future. Whenever you use mass effect technologies, the technologies your society so ardently needs to survive, you harm the very fabric of space. You tear the bonds that hold your reality, quickening the heat death of the universe. But more importantly, you quicken the death of your galaxy, long before its time comes."

She suddenly looked at him, a look of deep sadness etched into her feature, "Why did we give you mass effect technology, you ask? Because it is the easiest. It's the least harmful. Because there is not only one path to a goal, as one of your companions once stated,"

Shepard looked at her in surprise that she knew that particular conversation with Legion. Another pang of regret. She trudged on, uncaring, "But we know of the other ways. Other paths. Other technologies that lay hidden, discarded by us so long ago. We have lived long enough to explore, Human. And of all of those, we have found the technologies we have gifted you is the least destructive. But inevitability can only be held at bay for so long. We gave you the gift of Element Zero and the tools to harness its powers, because it killed the galaxy the slowest. It afforded you the most time, to grow and set your roots, to feel life and its pleasures, before we did what had to be done. And we gave you the mass relays so your society would grow along the path _we_ set for you, so your technologies could be controlled by _us_ when the time came. To your detriment. "

Shepard scrunched up his face, "But you use the very same technologies to destroy us! And you're far more powerful than we are… you are killing the galaxy too!" He seethed.

She looked down, the sadness not gone from her voice, "We could be much more powerful if we willed it, Human. We restrain ourselves, far more than you will ever know." Another pause, "Whatever mark we leave in the fabric of space, it is healed. For once we complete our task and depart, the galaxy has time to rest. To recuperate, to heal from the wounds our and your technologies inflict. And the younger species have time to grow. And the natural forces of the world set to righting the wrong that we commit, fighting the champion that heralds the end.

"Entropy…" Shepard echoed, tasting the word in the same vein the Reaper god used it, as though such a natural phenomenon was a living, thinking being. Maybe it was. Still, nagging doubts wouldn't leave the corner of his mind.

The Reaper god seemed to once again pick up on the fact as though it had a back door into his mind. "Your doubts are pointless. You think you could hold your own future without destroying yourselves, but could you? Tell me, Human, is there peace in you cycle, truly? The threat of war looms constantly on the borders of your space, and invaders and rebels have near conquered the galaxy twice, without our aid, ravaging countless worlds in their wake, worlds where future intelligence could have awoken. How many wars have already been fought? How long does peace last? If the synthetics don't wipe you out, you'll wipe each other out. It is inevitable. The patterns are there, for every cycle. You cannot escape. It is the order of nature. Peace cannot be kept without annihilation; by us, or _yourselves._ "

Shepard gave her a hard stare, her nonchalant justification for mass extinction infuriating him, "Then why don't you help keep the damn peace? You want to protect the galaxy by destroying its inhabitants? That's how you imagine protecting is done?"

"We limit ourselves to preserve balance,"

"You're so very limited, I'm sure," he spat back.

She continued, unconcerned, "But for us to stand vigil over an ever growing power that is the empires of man and machine would not be possible. You would surpass us, unfettered by the chains we hold onto ourselves. Thus there would be nothing to halt the galaxy's demise. We cut the stem before the roots go too deep, and you become a disease that cannot be culled. We are your salvation, and the salvation of all those who have yet to come."

More questions seeped into his mind; unsurprisingly, she asked for him, "You wish to know how we came to be?"

Shepard nodded slowly.

She didn't hesitate, answering without any trace of reluctance or enthusiasm. "Long before the ancestors of your species awoke, human, at a time when life was at its infancy on your planet, the first of my creators gained sentience. They were among the first to walk among the stars, and rightly so. For unlike most variety of intelligence that the universe births, they did not trace their lineage to a planet. They were born among the stars themselves, in the scattered guts of a dead one. They were a species unlike anything you can imagine, like spirits born of the stars themselves, holding no true corporeal form as you would understand it. And the nature of their creation gave them certain _liberties_ over the chains of physics that binds the rest of your kind. They created fantastic technologies, augmenting the powers that nature had gifted them. As they spread through the galaxy, other species came to revere and worship them, coveting the technologies that they would gift the lesser races. They were looked upon as gods, but they did not rule, for they were content to observe. Too see, to relish in life alone. To explore and to learn, to broaden the horizons for all. They saw no reason to meddle too greatly in the affairs of the other races."

"That was not to last. As they built and created, and watched over the other races, something horrific was discovered."

She turned to look at him intensely, her eyes more sorrowful than ever before, "They discovered that they were destroying the galaxy. Their technologies were tearing the fabric of space time, killing stars from the inside _._ They realized that the only way to reverse the damage was to cease the use of their greatest technologies, but they knew the other species would never abide. Civilization was different then; we did not need mass relays. They would jump from star to star on a whim. The marvels they had would was beyond description. But such things require power, power which they seeped from the stars. Stars were dying, and the great vessels that carried them across the galaxy was tearing that very galaxy apart. The great civilizations would have to destroy hundreds of thousands of years of progress to save themselves. To them, it was akin to what becoming primates again is to you. They did not agree with this."

"They tried for a long time to keep the peace, to stop organics fighting synthetics, organics fighting themselves, and to wean the galactic societies off the technologies that they so depended on. But it was to no avail. For all they did, war would not cease, and the great machines no one would give up. No one was willing to lock themselves within the confines of their own planet, no matter how much they tried. Curiosity is too much an addiction of advanced intelligence. It can never go away. And through it all, the young worlds would suffer the most. Those which had not yet had the chance to cultivate life, they would be disturbed by curious races, enslaved by others. Sometimes they would be burned down when their older kin would wage war."

"So my creators destroyed them all. Harbinger was the first made, from the greatest of the planet-born races. All Reapers take their outer skin from the form of Harbinger's seed. And my creators sacrificed themselves, forgoing their individuality and their immortal lives to become the collective will of the reapers. Every reaper has the spirit of my creators collective will within them. This is something you cannot comprehend, something which is far beyond your mortal mind. Suffice it to say, I am the avatar of the race first to walk the stars, gods born of a dead star. And I am the avatar of all the Reapers, for I am created when they channel their collective wisdom. Harbinger prompted my form this time, in a way you could comprehend, so we could make our will known to you. Every civilization to have ever lived, lives through me. I created the Mass Relays, for I judged their technology the slowest to bleed the stars. And I created the cycles to preserve the balance. It is as it must be."

Shepard suddenly realized the avatar had long since lost the cheerful, childish tone it had started out with. The voice was still that of a child, but there was an echo. An echo of his voice, and…a _female?_ Her tone was no longer anything like a child, carrying a deep reverberation of something _very_ ancient.

For once he managed to ask before she answered, "What do you want with me?"

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 **A/N: This is the first and introductory chapter to my version of what the ending should have been like. I actually enjoyed the ending (because I only played ME3 after the extended cut came out), but I know there is a massive amount of plot holes going on. I actually think the ending had real potential, if a few details were poked around with. In that line of reasoning, this still has the spirit of the original ending, interwoven with a little bit of Dark Matter Theory and AU.**

 **I'm writing this ending in the same vein as the games, with multiple alternate endings (I'll make one for a variety of different criteria i.e. morality, war assets etc etc), but bear in mind I can't actually write a dozen different ending for all the different love interests, so I might have a general one with a note for you to imagine it being YOUR love interest speaking the epilogue (I'll clear the details when the specific ending does come) :). Also, an ending with Shep living on (well ofcouuursee XD), and morality specific endings. I will also have ending where you absolutely fail, with everyone wiped out in no uncertain terms and the future uncertain (low war asset).**

 **I actually didn't think this was getting anywhere till that lone review came up. Thanks DigitalHelix!**


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